text: The Polyarc reactor needs hydrogen and air, which are both gases used in any existing FID setup. Software for capturing and analyzing FID signals remains applicable, and no extra software is necessary for the device. Gas flows to the device are controlled using an external control box that must be calibrated manually for the desired flows of air and hydrogen. The detector's overall response can be analyzed either by an external or an internal standard method.  
  In the external standard method, the FID signal is correlated to the concentration of carbon separately from the analysis. In practice, this entails the injection of any carbon species at varying amounts to create a plot of signal (i.e., peak area) versus injected carbon amount (e.g., moles of carbon). The user should take care to account for any sample splitting, adsorption, inlet discrimination, and leaks. The data should form a line with a slope, m, and an intercept, b. The inverse of this line can be used to determine the amount of carbon in any subsequent injection from any compound. 
  This is different from a typical FID calibration where this procedure would need to be completed for each compound to account for the relative response differences. The calibration should be examined periodically to account for catalyst deactivation and other sources of detector drift. 
  In the internal standard method, the sample is doped with a known amount of some organic molecule and the amount of all other species can be derived from their relative response to the internal standard (IS). The IS can be any organic molecule and should be chosen for ease of use and compatibility with the compounds in the mixture. For example, one could add 0.01 g of methanol as the IS to 0.9 g of gasoline. The 1 wt% mixture of methanol/gasoline is then injected and the concentration of all other species can be determined from their relative response to methanol on a carbon basis,
  The effects of injection-to-injection variability resulting from different injection volumes, varying split ratios and leaks are eliminated with the internal standard method. However, inlet discrimination caused by adsorption, reaction, or preferential vaporization in the inlet can lead to accuracy issues when the internal standard is influenced differently than the analyte.   
  Any non-carbon species that would not be detected in a traditional FID setup (e.g. water, nitrogen, ammonia) will not be detected with Polyarc/FID. This detector can be paired with other detectors that give complementary information such as the mass spectrometer or thermal conductivity detector.